French-Canadian Letters

£:5tters in Canada.· I948 PART II VI. FRENCH-CANADIAN LETTERS W. E. CoLLIN In his· discourses during Lent, Nos V ~leurs humainesJ Father Robert Bernier reminded his audience that "man today is attempting a vaster experience than patriotism or civilization. He wants to construct a human community." While the preacher took occasion to examine the French~ Canadian conscience, to call attention to the general lack of moral discipline , his chief purpose was to make clear the role of Christians in the creation of a brotherly community embracing the whole of humanity. He led their minds from the French~Canadian environment to the vaster idea of a Catholic world. The idea of a world community has inspired statesmen and social thinkers to write popular works such as One World and Planetary Democracy, but in the minds of Catholic churchmen the idea has long had the sanctity of a dogma, the Mystic Body of Christ. Marxism and social Catholicism are formulas of universal solidarity but, says Father Bernier, Catholicism has recourse_ to supernatural values which alone ensure the success of our collective efforts. "The Church of Christ possesses the accurate vision of the true future city: the union of persons among themselves and with God in eternity.... The Church believes that humanity can be saved by love.... Humanity must drink at the springs of charity. . . . The world must be converted . . . Christian principles must penetrate all our lile." Then the preacher made his special point: "We have, in a sense, been preserved in our good old province of Quebec. For 300 years we have lived more or less apart from world cata~ clysrnB. . . . But whoever 'wishes to reach the fulness of his stature, every nation and every civilization that does not want to lose its vigour, must enter into this immense collective effort." Recent popes, we are told, have recognized the vital need of union. Pope Pius XII has spoken of "making necessary sacrifices to establish an international authority, in favour of which states ought to give ·up a part of their sovereignty. . . . He has declared the work of the United Nations to be parallel with that of the Catholic Church." The Abbe Joseph Larochelle's work, La Solidarite humaineJ is a study of the idea of a world community in its social ru;pects and as it appears in the writings of the popes during the last sixty years or so, from Leo XIII to Pius XII. M. Larochelle speaks of "the great law of human solidarity, the mutual dependence of all men in the pursuit of happiness." "This doctrine of human solidarity," he says, "is that of the Church. It condemns egoism and class war, but not the distinction of classes. It condemns the absorption of the individual in society, but not society itself. It 366 LETTERS IN CANADA: 1948 367 extols the primacy of the common good, without for that reason sacrificing the rights of the human person." The teaching is summed up in the words of Mgr Donald A. MacLean's introduction: "Only through full realization of the Christian conception of an organic social order embracing all peoples will the maximum common good be secured." M. Marcel Clement uses the same mystique to establish an authoritarian principle of government which sounds to us more Germanic than French. His book, Esquisses pour l'homme, contains an authoritarian manifesto and t~elve studies of historical figures in whom the principle was incarnated. Man, we are told, who for the first time in his history possesses the certitude and the technical conditions of planetary unity, does not possess the human conditions for such a unity; he needs the "politics of unity," a spiritual power to govern his passions. Such a unity once existed. The spiritual unity of medieval Europe, we are told, guaranteed the Pax Catholica, the only example of a successful peace organization . When it was broken a materialistic conception followed. A spiritual authority universally recognized no longer existed; all was division. There will be no peace save in a spiritually unified world; there will be no love sufficiently strong to contain the passions of men save in the Mystic Body of Christ. The City of God is none other than...